Gimme celluloid: a history of Mick Jagger on film

Ahead of HBO’s rock drama Vinyl, which the Rolling Stones singer executive-produced, we take a look at his small screen and big screen exploits, which range from a terrible Ned Kelly to a sterling Performance

He has utilised his star clout to serve as a producer on two films about one of his heroes, James Brown (the biopic Get on Up and documentary Mr Dynamite), as well as Michael Apted’s second world war thriller Enigma, from 2001. Jagger, who owns an Enigma code-breaking machine himself, had a cameo as an RAF officer at a dance. He’s also been a driving force as a producer of a string of documentaries about the Stones, including Crossfire Hurricane (2012), and Shine a Light (2008), which was directed by his friend Martin Scorsese – who helms the debut, two-hour episode of Vinyl.

Jagger and his bandmates have appeared as themselves in numerous classic documentaries. These include Sympathy For The Devil (originally titled One Plus One), a probing, experimental portrait of the Stones at the tail end of the 1960s by French nouvelle vague director Jean-Luc Godard; and Gimme Shelter, a harrowing slice of cinéma vérité, which ultimately focuses on the 1969 Altamont concert during which 18-year-old audience member Meredith Hunter was stabbed and beaten to death by the band’s Hells Angels security force.

Then there’s the notorious Cocksucker Blues, Robert Frank’s stark chronicle of the Stones’ 1972 American tour. Named after a lascivious Jagger torch song dedicated to a policeman (“Well, he fucked me with his truncheon / And his helmet was way too tight”), it’s a grimy cavalcade of groupie sex and drug abuse that’s garnered a genuine cult reputation – a character in Don DeLillo’s epic novel Underworld speaks of loving “the washed blue light of the film … corruptive and ruinous, a beautiful tunnel blue”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the band, having commissioned Frank’s film, decided that its content was embarrassing and potentially incriminating, and did not want it shown. It remains widely unreleased today, but enjoys the occasional public screening (most recently at New York’s MoMA in December 2012).

Jagger the actor

Although Mick’s son James has a major role in Vinyl as a punk singer, Jagger Sr is not slated to appear in any sort of substantial role. That’s something of a shame, for while Jagger’s sojourns in front of the camera generally aren’t as well known or highly regarded as those of the late David Bowie (his co-star in the gloriously unhinged Dancing in the Street video), his acting filmography nonetheless throws up some interesting curveballs, and shows evidence of an intriguing, if sometimes wayward, screen presence.

Jagger’s acting career began in 1970 – the sandwich year between the Stones’ classic albums Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers – with both a whimper and a bang. With a twangy, unconvincing brogue, he was sorely miscast as the 19th-century Irish-Australian outlaw Ned Kelly in Tony Richardson’s drama of the same name. In a dismissive review, the New York Times wrote: “With a beard that makes him appear more Amish than Australian, [Jagger] is, sadly, simply a dour renegade who rarely becomes the ‘wild colonial boy’ of the legend.” The website Senses of Cinema quoted director Richardson on his disastrous film: “Ned Kelly was like having a stillborn child. The shape and features were all there, but without the breath of life.” Reportedly, neither Jagger nor Richardson turned up to the film’s premiere, so disappointed were they with the end result.

That same year, however, Jagger lit up Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s lysergic cult drama Performance, brilliantly portraying Turner, a drug-addled but canny rock star who messes with the mind of a fugitive gangster (James Fox). Stories of the film’s behind-the-scenes excess are the stuff of legend, and it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Jagger, every inch the shamanic rock star, playing the role with comparable intensity or androgynous flair. The film’s key song, Memo From Turner, performed by Jagger, is one the decade’s most indelible movie moments.

Aside from popping up as himself in 1978’s Beatles spoof The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, Jagger would not return to screens until 1982, when he appeared, sporting a desperately dubious fu-manchu mustache and topknot combo, as a Chinese emperor in the children’s TV show Faerie Tale Theatre.

The same year also produced one of cinema’s great casting what-ifs: Jagger was originally cast by Werner Herzog in the role of Wilbur, assistant to the wildly ambitious would-be rubber baron Fitzcarraldo in the film of the same name. Original lead Jason Robards was ruled out of the film thanks to a bout of dysentery, and the subsequent production delay meant that Jagger had to quit due to touring commitments – the title role eventually went to the unhinged Klaus Kinski, while the Wilbur character was cut entirely. The remaining surviving footage of Jagger as Wilbur, which was included in the 1999 documentary My Best Fiend, shows the star giving a shouty and wild-eyed, yet creepily ingratiating, turn: he could have been a great addition to the film.

Shot in 1985 and released in 1987, Running Out of Luck, directed by Julien Temple, has some curiosity value, but amounts to little more than an extended video clip advertising Jagger’s album She’s the Boss. The eyebrow-raising plot has thinly veiled Jagger proxy Mick heading to Brazil to shoot a video, then getting kidnapped and turned over to the oversexed owner of a banana plantation. Jagger’s next mooted acting project, a role as the demonic Axel Rex in a film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in The Dark, scheduled for 1986, never materialised. The film collapsed shortly after Rebecca De Mornay, cast as the sex-kitten seductress, clashed with the director and fled the production.

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Jagger returned to screens in 1992 with a scenery chewing, villainous turn in the cyberpunk thriller Freejack, alongside Emilio Estevez. His accent wanders from American to Australian to Cockney – frequently in the same sentence – but he’s clearly enjoying himself. The New York Times’ Janet Maslin summed up his performance astutely, writing: “Mr Jagger, managing to combine a sneer and a monotone, and revealing only the occasional flash of humor, is fun to watch but lucky to have other employment.”

Jagger’s next film roles were two of his best – if not comparable with Performance, then at least laudable on their own terms. In the Berlin-set Nazi-era drama Bent (1997), he gave a small but searingly memorable role as the drag queen Greta. His soaring rendition of Philip Glass’s Streets of Berlin, which rings out across the debauchery and urban rubble below, is a transcendent moment in a film of near-unrelenting bleakness. Then, in the 2002 indie drama The Man From Elysian Fields, Jagger played the gently devilish Lucius Fox, proprietor of an escort service for wealthy women. There’s a wonderful scene in which the outwardly smooth Fox gets his heart gently shattered by old flame Jennifer (Anjelica Huston). To see Jagger hold his own in a pivotal scene against a heavyweight like Huston suggests that he might have offered more as a dramatic presence than his scanty acting CV has allowed.

In recent years, as the Rolling Stones have continued to manfully stalk the veterans’ live circuit, Jagger has been restricted to the occasional cameo here and there – as a bank clerk in the Jason Statham romp The Bank Job; as a send-up of himself for Monty Python’s live show. It’s likely that his acting experiments are behind him, but Vinyl at least highlights a lifelong commitment to visual storytelling on his part – and, if we’re lucky, a new thespian star might be born in the form of his son.